Can the current controversies get any more sordid? Or more comical? Or more ripped from the pages of a satirical novel?
We already had a bent lawyer, a guy who looks like a gangster, an ambitious stripper, and a Playboy “model.” Today we learn that The National Perspirer has become part of the DOJ team. (And is it not pitch-perfect that the Perspirer should have a publisher named David Pecker?) Does this mean that team DOJ will now hold strategy meetings in super-market check-out lanes?
Considering the turn this circus is taking, and especially today’s loopy development, the most appropriate newsreader to deliver the latest, and perhaps the only one able to keep a straight face while doing so, is Fox’s Jonathan Hunt. Young Jonathan, who appears to have fallen from the pages of Scoop, Evelyn Waugh’s 1938 send-up of the press, reminds one of that long tradition of Britain’s tabloid press, even when he’s delivering non-tabloid news. If Hunt were reporting on a large asteroid scheduled to knock Earth out of its orbit 48 hours from now, or if he were doing a feature on a roller-skating horse, he would deliver either in the same earnest, urgent, insistent, and revelatory tone, complete with the properly wrinkled forehead behind those serviceable horn-rimmed glasses. He could certainly impart this latest news without cracking up, even make it sound like something a serious person should concern himself with. I guess over the next day or so we’ll see how many others in the news biz can meet this challenge.
